Reason for complaint

Source: Atlanta office of the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development

Facing discrimination?

For help on fair housing and equal opportunity issues, or bad landlords, complaints can be filed in various ways. • HUD’s Tennessee office can be reached at 865-545-4370 or 1-800-669-9777 or by accessing the HUD website at www.hud.gov/complaints/ housediscrim.cfm. Complaints may be filed up to one year after the alleged discrimination took place. • The Tennessee Human Rights Commission’s help line can be accessed at 1-800-251-3589. • The Tennessee Fair Housing Council can be reached at 615-874-2344.

Housing Summit begins today

The annual Governor’s Housing Summit will begin at 10:30 a.m. today at the Music City Center in downtown Nashville, bringing together housing providers, lenders, builders, nonprofits and government officials. Among topics to be discussed during the two-day summit are fair housing, blighted neighborhoods, mortgage reform, renters’ rights and affordable housing. Walk-up registrations will be accepted. For more information and a program of sessions, visit www.thda.org.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

If you’re a landlord or money lender bending the rules to discriminate against people looking for a place to live in Nashville, undercover agents soon may be coming for you.

Spurred by recent instances of discrimination, a burst of funding and heightened attention from the federal government, local housing rights advocates are amping up efforts to root out bias and teach prospective buyers or tenants their rights.

Housing discrimination is alive and well in Middle Tennessee, as a sweeping report put out late last year clearly shows. But the report, which set the stage for a broad-based push to prevent it, also shows that bias has a new face in the 21st century.

Barriers just aren’t as obvious as they once were.

“What has happened today is that, rather than discrimination being overt, more often than not, discrimination happens with a smile,” said David Berenbaum, chief program officer for the Washington, D.C.-based National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which has investigated discrimination in Tennessee. “Today, it’s much more difficult for consumers to really understand when their rights are being violated.”

That means minority families can be steered toward certain neighborhoods, given high-interest home loans or passed over for rentals. Yet race and skin color make up only a third of housing discrimination complaints taken up in recent years by local and state advocates.

So, along with the Chinese family denied a Nashville apartment because the landlord said their stir-fry cooking would smell bad and damage his stove, there was a family denied a wheelchair ramp for a child — a requirement under the Fair Housing Act — and another family threatened with eviction because the mother became pregnant.

All of those cases were confirmed by investigators and led to significant financial settlements. They also showed that people who are subjected to all kinds of discrimination may be able to do more about it than they realize.

Between 2002 and 2012, there were 286 housing complaints filed in Metro Nashville, according to the regional office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sixty-nine of those were substantiated, leading to $51,410 in settlements.

In the same time period, the Tennessee Fair Housing Council handled 462 complaints. The nonprofit assists in housing disputes in Nashville and bordering counties.

The Metro Human Rights Commission and the Tennessee Human Rights Commission also field complaints. One of the engines for launching the report was to better bring them together for identifying patterns of discrimination and developing systematic ways to prevent it, as well as helping people learn how to file complaints, as housing discrimination remains largely under­reported, advocates said.

Report findings

Last year, the Metropolitan Development and Housing Authority, which oversees public housing in Davidson County, probed housing discrimination as part of a requirement tied to its federal funding.

In its 169-page report, known as the “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice,” officials laid out dozens of cases of discrimination in Nashville. And in a call to action, they found that despite the work of the four organizations raising awareness of housing rights, “there is a clear need to expand the capacity of these organizations to provide a greater level of service.”

The report also raised red flags about the fairness of home lending by area banks.

A data analysis found that for every denial of a home loan to a white applicant, there were two denials for black applicants. Hispanics also were more likely to receive high-cost loans.

“These private-sector lending patterns indicate apparent racial discrimination,” the report states. “Even controlling for income, African-Americans are significantly less likely to be approved for a mortgage than white applicants.”

The report noted that the analysis of home loans would require deeper probing, which local and state officials plan to pursue in the coming year.

Knowing your rights

Despite ongoing work, many Nashvillians still don’t know their rights or how to file a complaint.

Angie Hubbard, MDHA director of community development, said she was shocked when a local survey found that many people who experienced discrimination didn’t file a report — not because they didn’t know how but because they said they didn’t feel it would do them any good.

“When I saw those (results), I was like, ‘We have got to change those,’ ” Hubbard said. “A lot of them knew where to file a complaint — it was just that they didn’t feel like it would matter. And we need to change that.”

Filing a report can also be intimidating. The Tennessee Human Rights Commission, the state’s agency dedicated to investigating discrimination, was called to help a woman last year in a case in which her landlord shut off her electricity in retaliation for a complaint she filed. In that settlement, the woman received $2,000 and the landlord was ordered to undergo training.

The MDHA report recommended undercover testing, a public service ad campaign and more seminars for landlords, real estate agents and government staff.

MDHA is acting on those recommendations now, including providing funding for housing rights education for the first time.

Because MDHA soon will be pursuing new housing projects in low-income areas, the agency wanted to make sure those residents know their rights, Hubbard said. That’s one reason MDHA just awarded a $75,000 grant to the Tennessee Fair Housing Council to address housing discrimination in the next year.

“What we don’t want to happen are predatory realtors or investors coming into these neighborhoods to try and talk people into selling their homes and things like that,” Hubbard said. “We want to make sure residents are empowered to know what their rights are and who to call if they think they’ve been subject to discrimination or a predatory practice.”

Red flags in lending

The effort in Nashville comes on the heels of a busy year for the Tennessee Human Rights Commission. The commission celebrated its 50th anniversary on Friday and published its annual report.

The commission had a big year, helping 49 people with complaints, an increase from 38 the year before.

Commission Executive Director Beverly Watts said fair housing efforts have been kick-started in recent years because of a prominent lawsuit out of New York that triggered new federal regulations. She said the rules always have been built in, but there’s new energy now.

“People really have a sense that we have to do this,” she said.

The human rights commission recently has investigated a growing number of cases involving biases against pregnant women and people with disabilities, she said. In one case, a landlord prevented a couple from bringing in an emotional support animal despite documentation from a doctor, leading to a $10,000 settlement and a mandatory seminar. In another, a landlord refused to provide a parking spot for a disabled person — that prompted an $11,500 payment.

The commission has partnered in recent years with Berenbaum and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), which helped investigate home loan data for the region.

The coalition found evidence of discriminatory lending by some banks, affecting certain neighborhoods, Watts said. The findings — thus far presented to local advocates and lenders — could be publicly available soon.

The Tennessee Fair Housing Council, which has been assisting people with complaints for years, will use some of its MDHA grant for undercover tests of banks and lenders. In recent years, the council had focused on rental discrimination.

“This offers us an opportunity to get back into it,” said Tracey McCartney, executive director for the council. “Testing gives you another view of it — what might a typical consumer’s experience be, depending on their race or national origin.”

McCartney said the council also will expand its counseling for those whose rights have been violated and create classes in neighborhoods that have not had housing outreach in years.

“These are people who have had to sort of just endure whatever their landlord has dished out,” she said. “They have very little money and little mobility.”

The new efforts aim to help people who suffer from discrimination to realize they can do something about it.